Team:UrbanTundra Edmonton/Engagement


Urban Tundra | Intelligent Innovation

Despite Alberta having many successful iGEM teams over the years, much of that success was not well known in Edmonton. Our team was completely student-run in beginning, having raised the registration fee ourselves as well as finding lab space to perform our experiments. While it did build a lot of character and work ethic, having to build an iGEM team from scratch was not something we would recommend to future high school iGEm teams. We wanted to inform the general public and students all over Edmonton about the amazing field of synthetic biology and its applications, in the hopes that future iGEM teams and other synthetic biology ventures would start cropping up in the Edmonton area. Below are some of the public engagement activities that we performed to reach this goal.

Community Outreach

We visited three different junior high/elementary schools in the Edmonton area, all in various parts of the city. We performed experiments and team-building exercises with the students, as well as giving introductory presentations on genetics and genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is not really found in the standard Alberta biology curriculum, and genetics is not introduced until high school. For many of the students we presented to, this was their first time hearing about the field. Our main demographic were students aged (8-14). Our hope is that these students will take interest in genetic engineering as they come into high school and form iGEM teams of their own.

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